“Greenpeace is entreating all designers, professional and otherwise, to ‘design a new logo that’s more suitable to [BP's] dirty business,’ the organization writes on its Web site. The contest is actually pegged to BP’s investment in oil extraction from Canadian sand pits, a process said to produce four times as much CO2 as conventional drilling, though entrants are free to find inspiration in any of BP’s unseemly activities. The winning design will be featured in Greenpeace’s anti-BP campaigns. Submissions will be accepted through June 28.”

Twitter and Facebook are growing like weeds, with 60 million and 400 million members each, respectively. Last month Twitter announced that its account-holders are churning out 50 million Tweets per day, to ever-expanding networks of friends and colleagues (and, let’s be honest, robots). According to stats published in :

“Web analyst firm HubSpot estimates that the average Twitter user now has 300 followers — compared to 70 in July — and follows 170, a substantial increase from 45 in the middle of the year. And, users are tweeting more, with the average output growing from 120 in July to 420.”

There’s a danger to looking at averages, though. Ashton Kutcher, Ellen DeGeneres and Britney Spears each have more than 4.5 million followers (see ).

And while total Twitter membership is up to nearly 60 million accounts, visitors to Twitter.com remained flat in the 2nd half of 2009. Again from :

“According to data from Web analytics company Compete, Twitter attracted approximately 22 million visitors in December 2009, which was pretty much unchanged from June levels. From its best month, August, the visitor metric fell by 770,000.”

Twitter usage on client and mobile apps such as Tweetdeck isn’t counted by website traffic firms like Compete, but it’s not logical to me that the percentage of Twitter users who use downloadable clients, which requires a bit more technical know-how than visiting a website, would grow faster than usage of Twitter.com as its overall audience has expanded to a more mainstream (and less technical) population.

According to BarracudaLabs, only 21 percent of Twitter accounts are active, if you define “active” as an account holder who has at least 10 followers, follows at least 10 people and has Tweeted at least 10 times. (See .)

Facebook has a similar problem. Total membership is bigger than the entire human population in the United States and those members push 5 billion pieces of content into Facebook newsfeeds every week. But the activity rates per person — sharing links, photos or status updates — are falling. From :

“While the actual raw count of data shared has skyrocketed, the overall percentage of Facebookers who post status updates daily has actually fallen. Which means that on the whole, Facebook’s users may be much less engaged with the site. And much of the increased content-sharing is coming either from a proportionally smaller group or from the much larger number of pages being published — many of those, however, are promotional vehicles for other companies, particularly local businesses.”

With total audience numbers as big as Facebook’s, I’m not downgrading its odds of achieving world domination. But declining engagement rates aren’t a good thing. What is Facebook if members aren’t participating? Anecdotally, I know many Twitter lurkers who actively use the service as vital news aggregator. The non-contributing Facebookers I know tend to lose interest altogether.

Anyhoo, because I know you need to know, here’s what I’m up to: Awwww, cloudy Saturday morning in SF!! #ihatecloudydays

Above is Sprint’s “TypePad Conversation,” a sponsored unit that runs across Six Apart blog sites. From :

“Six Apart has developed an ad format that uses sponsored questions to help brands engage with blog audiences. Called TypePad Conversations, the product consists of a module that publishers can embed on their pages and use to spark conversations with readers in a sponsored format. Reader responses appear on the individual sites where the module is hosted, and can also be aggregated in a hub on the advertiser’s site, Facebook page, or standalone destination.”

I bet this format is going to be a winner. Reminds me of the idea from Dice and its agency Modem Media / Digitas, a project Bernie Albers (now at Six Apart) and I had the chance to work on back in 2006 when we were both at Federated Media. Congrats to Bernie, David Tokheim, Andrew Anker and Chris Alden at Six Apart; and to the Sprint team, which includes Elizabeth Paynter and Sara Devine at Mindshare, and Stephanie Wilroy, Starla West and Rich Pesce at Sprint.

Miss the good old days of 2005? It turns out dialing back your privacy settings isn’t easy. From the :

“The new opt-out settings certainly are complex. Facebook users who hope to make their personal information private should be prepared to spend a lot of time pressing a lot of buttons. To opt out of full disclosure of most information, it is necessary to click through more than 50 privacy buttons, which then require choosing among a total of more than 170 options.”

According an study, forty percent of 18-to-24 year-olds and twenty percent of 25-to-38 year-olds “hate” advertising on YouTube and Hulu. Below chart (and further analysis) from .

Hate is a pretty strong sentiment. I mean it’s one thing to be annoyed or to check the box on a survey that says you’d consider paying for content to reduce the ad clutter on your favorite site (even if you’re lying). But hate, wow. That sent me to Compete and Alexa to see just how fast viewers are abandoning those two sites. But I found no such thing.

Compete shows unique visitors to YouTube growing over the past year, from 70-some-odd million uniques in early 2009 to nearly 98 million in January 2010. February and March are down from the January peak, to around 91 million uniques — December 2009 levels. Hulu unique visitor counts over the past year have been bouncing from 6 million to 8.5 million, with a high-water mark at 9.1 million in December 2009, and back to the 7.5 to 8.5 million range in the first quarter of 2010.

Alexa says YouTube’s global pageviews are down 1.64% over the past 3 months, but they’re up 3.58% in the most recent month and up almost 25% yesterday.

At least in the case of YouTube and Hulu, at least for now, ad hatred does not correspond to audience abandonment.

“While Twitter has nearly equaled Facebook in awareness among Americans — 87 percent now know of it, compared with 26 percent last year — it still lags behind in use, Teddy Wayne writes in The New York Times.”

Twitter usage is still way, way behind that of Facebook but it’s enormous awareness will keep Facebook on its toes, especially when you look at this other data point from the Edison Research study:

“[Twitter] users are more than three times as likely to follow brands and companies on Twitter as other users of social networks do, with over 40 percent using Twitter to learn about and provide opinions on brands.”